Into the crisis: Fab Labs – a European story

Abstract

Fab Labs are small workshops, open to the public, that offer tools and services for digital manufacturing, thus promoting social and economic innovation. On this basis, these workshops can be considered as ‘local collective goods’: created as part of the sharing economy, Fab Labs are able to generate external, tangible and intangible economies, useful for development. The aim of this article is to explore Fab Labs and their diffusion in Europe, with particular reference to the French and Italian situation. France and Italy are, indeed, particularly interesting cases, because whilst the official indicators describe their economies as not especially innovative, they also show a surprising development of the Fab Labs.